The prevalence of the electronic filing system has increased the need for image reading apparatuses as input means. The electronic filing system used for office work, among other uses, is demanded to have higher speed processing in order to improve work efficiency. Main stream process methods of electronic filing systems process documents as follows: sheets of a document are sent out sequentially from a document feeding table, and each sheet of the document is transmitted at a high speed to a fixed image reader. The Model No. KX-SS55N, a product manufactured by Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., is an example embodying this process.
In this image reading apparatus, an upper most document of plural documents stacked on the document feeding table must be sent out sheet by sheet without the sheets being overlapped. For this purpose, a document to be sent out is pressed by a pick-up roller with a given pressure, and the roller spins to send out the document. Further, a mechanism such as a retarding roller is provided in order to avoid feeding plural documents simultaneously in error.
When such a higher speed image reading apparatus is commercialized in the market, an apparatus that can handle various types of documents, such as a compound document (e.g. duplicated document made of impact papers), card, and continuous documents, is required, as well as having the further higher speed which is demanded.
However, when continuous documents are sent out from the document feeding table, the pick-up roller sometimes damages the continuous documents due to excessive pressure applied to seams of the documents.
The present invention addresses this problem and aims to provide an image reading apparatus that can handle continuous documents without damaging them.